I have been recently been applying for support from an employer for travel funding to attend the 2015 IASSIST conference to present the Aristotle Metadata Registry and after adding up the cost, I started thinking about the benefits that would justify this expense.

I’ve had two people offer to provide translation for Aristotle-MDR and I started considering the unaccounted for benefits I’ve already received. For arguments sake, lets consider a typical conference registration cost of $500 (AUD or USD) with accommodation and travel being another $1000. For attendance to be beneficial, you’d want to be able to see at least $1500 in return.

I started by looking at professional translation costs, which can cost as high as $100 per hour. So, if translating a portion of the project takes an hour, for the two languages that are (or will soon be) available, I can say that Aristotle has received about $200 of volunteer effort. With this in mind, I started thinking about how little support needs to be rallied to quickly provide a return on an investment in attending a conference.

If we consider freelancer developers can be hired for about $50, this means that for our conference, we’d need to get around 30 hours of work – not a small amount, especially when done for free. But broken down across multiple attendees this shrinks dramatically. If a talk is able to encourage moderate participation from as little as 3 people in an audience, this becomes 10 hours of work. Spread again across the course of a year, this is under an hour a month!

Given the rough numbers above, convincing 3 attendees to provide an hour of work a month gives a very rough approximate of $1800 of service – a 20% return on investment.

Along with programming or user interface development, there are other metrics when calculating the value generated from open-source. As a developer, I know the intrinsic value of a well written bug report, so even discovered bugs that lead to improvements are highly valuable for a project. This means that numbers of filed and closed bugs can be used as a rough metric (albeit a very, very rough metric) for positive contributions.

Ultimately, while there are strong ideological reasons for contributing to open-source, when developing for open-source projects within a business context these need to be offset with solid financial rational.